The Dragon, the Wind and the Demon
by omega93
Summary: Southern Japan is in ruins, flooded with Leviathan's waves and fleeing refugees from Kyushu. Among the chaos, Kenta comes across a feral child with curly brown hair, a deadly power and an insatiable thirst for murder.


**The dragon, the wind, and the demon Chapter one  
**  
There could be any number of explanations for why a foreign child was lying on the ground in the middle of a rice field. After the mess that had been Kyushu, Kenta had seen dozens of similar situations as he made his way through Japan, aimless. Survivors of the sunken island had flooded into the rest of Japan, and the rest of the country was unable to accommodate for all of them.

There were two factors that set this child apart from a typical starving homeless girl, however. Two reasons why he had approached slowly and quietly.

The first was the dried blood covering her tiny body almost from head to toe.

The second was the unsheathed and bloody katana clenched in her grip so tight that her knuckles were white as paper.

Kenta lit a cigarette and crouched down to get a better look at the girl. She was waif thin and, to his growing discomfort, closer to toddler than child. The cuts and bruises all up her emaciated body tried to tell another story, but her curly brown hair was thin enough to betray just how young she was.

Her clothes were so filthy beneath the dried blood that Kenta initially thought she was naked. Truth be told, Kenta would have surely thought the girl was dead if not for the shaky rise and fall of her chest. It looked like she had simply collapsed in the street, rather than an actual attempt to get some rest.

Apart from the sword and the blood, she looked like an innocent child.

Kenta sighed and stood back up. As he did so, his knees made a faint popping noise. So quiet, he could barely hear the sound himself, but immediately the child's eyes snapped open and she sprung to her feet, her katana held at the ready.

Before Kenta could say a word, the girl disappeared.

And his world exploded with pain.

~~~~~

When he woke up, the sun had set and the moon had replaced it. The stars were as bright as he had ever seen them; there was evidently no electricity nearby to challenge their light.

The upper half of his body hurt like he had been stung by ten thousand hornets. When he tried to rise, the world spun and his vision swam. He ended up lying back down, waiting for it to pass. It took a good ten minutes before he could sit up without feeling nauseous.

It took twenty more to get his thoughts in decent enough order to wonder where he was and what the fuck happened to him.

Or, to put it more accurately now that something resembling memory returned to him, what the fuck the child had done to him. His chest and neck stung as he thought of the girl. As if in response to the pain, he felt himself ramping up ever so slightly. The regeneration kicking in a little to speed up the healing.

Soon enough, he was able to stand up. He took out a cigarette and lit it with a snap of his fingers.

Whoever the girl was, whatever she had done, she had made an enemy of Lung. And she would pay.

~~~~~

After a few hours, Lung found his way to a nearby town. The night was still dark, and somehow the town was still darker. Kenta expected a town at night to be quiet, especially in a backwater town with traditional Japanese housing, but not like this. Not utter, suffocating silence.

He felt himself amping up as he drew closer, his height growing and his strength increasing in anticipation of some kind of fight. He was far from frightened. Lung had fought the ocean and driven it back, futile as the action seemed in retrospect. He was a dragon; he needn't feel fear.

Head held high, he strode into town and found a slaughtering ground. Blood, viscera and body parts were strewn across the roads and pathways. The buildings were all noticeably darker than they should have been in the moonlight, painted red with splatters of gore.

There was a coppery smell in the air. Whatever had happened here, it had gone down recently.

Lung started as the distant sound of something metal crashing to the ground reached his ears, shortly followed by a begging scream.

Very recently.

Ramping up even further, now a good two feet above his usual height, Lung stalked towards the origin of the noise.

He found himself at the end of a narrow back road, staring at the form of a young woman crawling backwards away from a tiny figure. The woman was crying and begging hysterically, one hand held in front of her as if to protect her face, the other clawing her along the ground. The other seemed half dead on its feet, stumbling forward and struggling to lift the object in its hands.

When he recognised the katana that was taller than the figure holding it, a nagging suspicion that had been at the back of his mind was confirmed. Almost automatically, he slipped into a fighting stance, feeling himself ramp up even further.

Lung wrote the crying woman off as irrelevant - she was dead anyway - and fixed his eyes on the dark figure she was backing away from. The object of his recently sworn vengeance.

When she finally stepped forward into the light of the moon, Lung knew his steady ramping up had been warranted. The girl looked completely different from however long ago he had seen her. Gone was the innocent sleeping face. Replacing it was one of a demon.

A monster out for nothing else than to taste blood. What had happened in this town was a testament to that. As Lung studied the girl's features, she was suddenly between him and the woman, her katana held up like she had just finished an upwards slash.

The woman had time to let out a choked scream before exploding in a fountain of blood, as if she had just been cut a thousand times.

The girl barely paid any attention to the gruesome mess she had left in her wake, her eyes now fixed on Lung as if seeing him for the first time.

Looking straight back at her, Lung saw something predatory in those eyes, gleaming in anticipation. The girl was feral. Feverish.

There was no need for words here. They both knew what they wanted. Lung grinned at her, then let out a roar and charged.

His world exploded with pain once more.

~~~~~

1.2

"What happened here?" Lee asked, taking one knee before a bloodied Hero. One of the Sentai Elite, if he recalled correctly. The man would not survive, the blood spurting from the stumps of his legs would see to that.

The man looked up at Lee through half-lidded eyes. Even in his near-death state, he managed to look hostile.

Eventually the hero - Kuro Ashi, Lee finally remembered - seemed to come to a decision, and spoke. "Black Kaze." His voice was raspy, filled with pain. "We tried to corner her in a town South of here. Tried to stop her from getting to Yamaguchi."

Lee gave a pointed look up at their current location. The hero seemed to catch on, chuckling lightly before wincing with pain.

"Yes. Evidently, we failed. We thought Ishiku would be a counter to her abilities. We were overconfident." Kuro Ashi took a long, wheezing breath. "The child is feral, but she is not stupid."

"Is Ishiku alive?" Lee asked. He could imagine the plan the heroes had attempted. A natural counter to a teleporter like Black Kaze was to change the environment around her, and Ishiku could erect solid stone walls in seconds. He was not the most formidable hero in the Sentai Elite, but one of the most difficult to fight.

Kuro Ashi shook his head slowly. His breaths were coming shorter and harsher now. He would not last long. "There are none of us left," he managed to wheeze out. "Reinforcements will not arrive in time." He gave Lee a stern look, fire in his eyes. "She cannot be allowed to reach Hiroshima. That city has suffered enough for a hundred lifetimes."

Lee nodded, completely unsurprised. Word of Black Kaze's horrific exploits had traveled the country like wildfire in the wake of Kyushu's destruction. Many had gone down with the island, but more than enough survived to tell tale of the katana wielding serial killer. If the stories could be believed, the child parahuman had finished off the work Leviathan had started, cutting down tens of thousands as they attempted to flee the floods.

Some even said the girl was equal to Leviathan in sheer body count. Lee found that difficult to believe, but in the time since he had been sent to retrieve the girl, he was understanding more and more where these rumours held their basis.

He was also understanding that he would fail in the task the Yakuza had set for him. Black Kaze was not a cape that could be controlled. She was more animal than human at this point.

And now she was on the mainland, set to once again assist the Endbringer, this time in causing the downfall of Japan as a whole.

"You are right," Lee spoke with confidence. "She will not make it to Hiroshima."

Lee set the dead hero on the ground and stood, taking a moment to bow his head for the fallen. The streets of Yamaguchi were littered with corpses. Hoards of refugees cut down as they tried to escape. Dotted among the bodies were those of heroes, stragglers from the Sentai Elite. Hachikuma's upper half was sprawled over the hood of a car, the pain and fear of her final moments captured in her expression. Ronin was only recognisable by the wakizashi next to his kote-sleeved hand. Eiyuu, leader of Honshu's Sentai Elite division, was a bloody wreck with only his head visible among a mound of red pulp.

The landscape of the city looked normal, so Ishiku had probably died further south.

Without Ishiku, Black Kaze would have overwhelmed the heroes in seconds, hence the carnage that had descended upon Yamaguchi.

Lee took a deep breath, touching the knives clipped to his vest.

The girl could not continue on her bloody warpath. Oni Lee would not allow it.

His body turned to ash, and he was gone.

~~~~~ 


End file.
